Lovett, Lyle

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Lyle Lovett

Singer, songwriter, guitarist

In 1988 a Rolling Stone reporter called Lyle Lovett “the best thing to come out of the country scene in years.” Lovett combines the sounds of his native Texas with blues and folk to create a striking new music, welcome to fans of rock and country alike. At a time when many country artists are returning to their roots, Lovett seems unafraid to challenge boundaries. His cosmopolitan appearance and darkly humorous, sometimes violent lyrics mark him as an experimenter and a maverick. In Who’s Who in New Country Music, Andrew Vaughan suggests that Lovett “is all set to take country music out of that mythical redneck ghetto and introduce the beauty and power of Texas music to a vast number of country and rock fans.”

Artists who write all of their own songs are becoming quite rare in Nashville. Lovett is a standout in that respect; he creates all his own material, melody and lyrics. Vaughan notes that the musician “sees with a poet’s eye and writes with a jaunty turn of phrase,” and “he’s just as happy with beat generation, finger-popping jazz as he is with dusty home-on-the-range Texas ballads. And what is most staggering is that he manages to blend his stylistic influences into an identifiable whole.”

Lovett was born and raised in Klein, Texas, a community named for his great-great grandfather, a German immigrant. Klein is not exactly a small town—it has a population of some 40, 000—but it had a rural feel when Lovett was a youngster. He grew up in a tight-knit extended family with parents who supported his adventurous tendencies. Lovett began playing the guitar when he was only seven and learned to love both country and rock music. His favorite artists were other blues-folk singer-songwriters, including Guy Clark, Townes Van Zandt, and especially Jerry Jeff Walker.

Lovett began to perform professionally while attending Texas A&M University, where he majored in journalism. From the first he gravitated to the coffee house circuit rather than the dance hall—his music has never lacked punch, but it is best appreciated by an attentive listener. He also began to write his own songs quite early in his career. He told Vaughan: “I started doing covers but I was never a good enough singer to do Merle Haggard tunes, so I realized that I had to do my own. If I’d been a better singer or player maybe I’d have never started writing.”

Lovett took his singing and songwriting talents along with him when he went to do graduate study in Germany in the early 1980s. His performances there earned him an invitation to a country music festival in Luxembourg, where he worked as a between-sets filler. As Lovett recalled the time in Rolling Stone, he was more or less laying an egg with the crowd until one of the scheduled

For the Record…

Born ca. 1958 in Klein, Tex.; son of William and Bernell Lovett. Education: Texas A&M University, B.A. (journalism), 1980; also did graduate work.

Singer, songwriter, guitarist, 1980—. Signed with MCA Records, 1984, released first album, Lyle Lovett, 1985. Has performed live in the United States and Europe.

Awards: Grammy Award for best male country vocal performance, 1989, for album Lyle Lovett and His Large Band.

Addresses: Record company —MCA/Curb Records, 70 Universal City Plaza, Universal City, CA 91608.

bands, J. David Sloan and the Rogues, joined him onstage. Lovett struck up a friendship with the Rogues, a Phoenix-based ensemble, and when he earned a recording contract with MCA Records in 1984 he recruited the Rogues for his sessions.

Lovett’s first album, Lyle Lovett, was released in 1985 and was quickly hailed as an “absolute must” by Steve Pond in Rolling Stone. The album contains more than one nod to Texas influences, but it also features jazz and even a cello accompaniment. Several of the songs found their way onto the country charts, with a best seller being “God Will,” a frank but funny look at betrayal. Lovett followed his debut with another, bluesier album, Pontiac, released in 1988. Somewhat darker in its themes if not in its sound, Pontiac yielded another hit, “She’s No Lady.”

Pontiac confirmed the central tendencies in Lovett’s work—the characters in his songs are hardly model citizens, and the course of true love never ever runs smooth. As David Wild puts it in Rolling Stone, Lovett’s pieces “do contain an unusually high body count of casualties in the war between the sexes.” Inevitably, Lovett has been accused of a streak of misogyny, a charge he denies vehemently. He told People: “A lot of times when I write, the female character is doing something to the male character. Frequently it’s something that I have actually done in a relationship. And rather than point the finger at myself, it’s a lot more fun to blame somebody else.”

Antisocial though his creations may be, Lovett has not alienated his fans. His work is seen as a fresh direction for country—hip and modern but still pulsing with the bitter emotions that characterize rural music. Lovett has never been afraid to challenge an audience. His music ranges through country, jazz, rock, blues, and R&B, his poetic lyrics call up a sea of troubles, and his intentionally avant-garde appearance breaks every rule for standard Nashville garb.

Lovett told Rolling Stone that he never worries about being misunderstood, even when he is misunderstood. “In some cases, I think people gef the joke, but they just don’t like the joke,” he said. “I realize my sense of humor is tacky sometimes, but I hope it comes across in the shows that it’s not malicious. Sure, I have psychopathic thoughts, but real psychopaths have nothing but those thoughts. And as for offending people, I’ve occasionally worried about hurting the feelings of the people I know that I write about. But it really hasn’t been much of a problem.”

Lovett makes some two hundred personal appearances each year, travelling across the country in a bus with his band. He is particularly popular as a live performer, achieving “remarkable intimacy with a voice that’s weathered, comfortable and haunting,” to quote Pond. The critic concludes that Lyle Lovett “writes songs whose lyrics are as flowing and musical as the tunes to which he sets them. He sings in the voice of a guy who disdains commitment, a ramblin’ man who still rues the day some damn woman managed to tame him, and in the voice of the barroom cynic who’ll occasionally give you a glimpse of his sensitive side.” Still in his mid-thirties, Lovett seems poised to lead the way into a new era of experimental country.